Guys like James Bond and Jason Bourne are best known for being secret agents and working covertly. But what if a country's top operative had a very public day job?

Cain Olsen is an international diplomat with some serious skills in The Diplomat, Arch Enemy Entertainment's new political thriller that taps into some of the stickiest real-life situations of the modern world.

"When diplomacy fails, maybe there's certain things where you need a diplomat on the ground to save the day. He would weigh things different than just an operative sent on a mission. He would have a different approach because of his pedigree," says Arch Enemy founder William Wilson, who created The Diplomat with writer Neil Thompson.

Every Friday, USA TODAY will exclusively present new pages from the first issue of The Diplomat, which features art by Claudio Sepulveda and covers by Eric Henson.

The first Diplomat chapter introduces Olsen, a former special operative who tries to solve problems first with his mind nowadays instead of a sniper rifle. But the stuff hits the fan quickly and things get tense in the region of China, North Korea and South Korea.

"A nice peaceful guy tries to solve these problems with diplomacy and ends up just getting havoc from North Koreans and all sorts of ulterior devious stuff," Thompson says.

He and Wilson wanted to create a franchise with complex characters living in a world of global conflict and 24-hour news cycles, but they wanted somebody cut from a different cloth aside from guys who lose their memories or folks who are monumentally great at being a spy and ordering martinis.

"It's very easy to just make a guy on a mission to save the day, but it's interesting if the spy decided to quit the spy game because he didn't want to fight," Wilson explains. "He didn't want conflict. He wanted to resolve it peacefully but then gets so caught up into something that he's got to refer to that old skill set he has.

"Diplomacy sometimes just isn't as simple as being black and white. Sometimes there is a gray, and it's about that journey of exploration and finding that."

Thompson says that Olsen has a serious impetus to avoid conflict and has had his fill of being forced to fight and being drawn back into it, but realizes "it doesn't matter how much you want peace if the other guy refuses."

The Diplomat will also delve into the theme of how, in this post-9/11 world, everybody loves the soldier but not the war.

"What do you do when you put the soldier on the ground to be the diplomat and he has to resort to that or there's not going to be a world to live in?" Wilson says. "He has to make that moral call, even though the audience doesn't know he's making it to protect them."

Adds Thompson: "And lest we get too arduous, let's not forget it's fun to just have carte blanche to make (stuff) blow up."